


i slightly am becoming something a little different, in fact

by prettylittlegoat



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Panic Attacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-07 03:43:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5442113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettylittlegoat/pseuds/prettylittlegoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The boy was sheened with the sweat from 36 hours of no food and 48 of no sleep... He was screaming then - hands in fists. Q’s head went up, and his eyes were blazing and swimming with wetness. Two spots, bright and feverish and damp, rose to the highs of his cheekbones, and his voice only narrowly avoided breaking: a fragile roar. Bond leaned back, feeling a sense of foreboding, and he knew that this would not blow over clean or pretty or fast."</p><p>q has an ugly panic attack and bond holds him through it</p>
            </blockquote>





	i slightly am becoming something a little different, in fact

**Author's Note:**

> the title is from the e. e. cummings poem usually called 'my mind is'.  
> i wrote this over the course of maybe 2 hours to stall and observe my own panic attack, so maybe it'll be a little real to read. i really hope it's enjoyed!  
> this is unbetaed, so please feel free to point any strangenesses out. i'm sure they're there!

“When I ask you to please bring your equipment back," the Quartermaster began, darkly, “why, Bond, do I feel as though you take it, at best, as a suggestion and, at worst, as a challenge?” Q reached a hand up to his nose, lifting his thick-rimmed glasses to pinch the bridge there. He let out a sigh, shaky and hitching from exhaustion.

Q’s eyes, drilling in the double-oh in front of him, betrayed his exhaustion: they were cushioned by smudges of purple and red and fine lines spider-webbed out from the corners. Too little sleep, too much caffeine. Even from where his angular hands rested on the table, Bond could see the twitch and tremble in those slender fingers. They were so pale, but the knuckles were swollen pink-red, and the nails were bitten to the quick. There was blood in the bed of the right thumb.

And yet, despite Q’s visibly exhausted state, Bond flashed his grin, all bent nails and ice. It did not reach the post-mission manic in his shattered-glass eyes. “Looks like you’re finally catching on, pup. There may be hope for you yet. And I _have_ brought something back this time,” he said. From his pocket, the agent took a blackened chunk of something - something that Q knew at once had a former life as a radio. The soft noise it made being set on the table betrayed it as plastic, and Bond winked. “But don’t presume to become used to it, Quartermaster.”

Q stared, somewhat blankly, at the useless remains of the was-radio. His slender fingers - shaking, and fragile-looking, Bond noted - reached to pick it up. It looked precisely how one would expect a radio to _not_ look, and he pulled back after some brief seconds of inspection. Folding his hands on the table again, he looked towards Bond once more. “And the gun?” His voice was taut and brittle - a string stretched tight, close to snapping.

Bond shook his head, and he shoved his hands deep into his pockets. He looked at a bookshelf behind Q: Hawking, Curie, Hardy, and a battered copy of The Silmarillion, puffed thick with page tabs. “No such luck, I’m afraid.”

“Elaborate.”

“It has a lovely new home at the bottom of the Seine with my late mark.” He paused, and glanced at Q. The boy was sheened with the sweat from 36 hours of no food and 48 of no sleep, and Bond stored that information away with his other notes. “You could say she had, ah, attachment issues.”

Again the Quartermaster was quiet. It was eerie, and the agent raised an eyebrow. And then - “Out.” Bitter words.

“Pardon?”

“Out. Out, 007! Out!” He was screaming then - hands in fists. Q’s head went up, and his eyes were blazing and swimming with wetness. Two spots, bright and feverish and damp, rose to the highs of his cheekbones, and his voice only narrowly avoided breaking: a fragile roar. Bond leaned back, feeling a sense of foreboding, and he knew that for all of Q's birdlike charm, his bones like willow branches, that he wasn't okay and that this wouldn't blow over clean or pretty or fast.

“Q, you were on comm. Be rational,” he said, knowing the words were as wrong as widdershins.

The tremble in Q’s arms was, perhaps, more pronounced now and spread to the rest of him. For a fractional second, it seemed as if more words would spill from that mouth, but instead, he turned on heel and stormed towards the glass-walled office on the far end of Q-branch: his only sanctuary. Bond hadn’t even finished his testimony to the necessity of the gun’s loss when the door slammed quietly, hydraulics hissing, and the glass went dark.

For some seconds, Q-branch sat in an ill silence, and Bond sat with them. No one dared to day anything to the shocked double-oh, who looked more lost than any had seen him before. His face was the picture of a child who had pushed too hard and paid for it, but didn't yet understand just _why_ that was.

 

Slowly, the rows of quiet little behind him began to stumble back to life, and another skinny child of a genius took Q’s place, clicking into the comm and speaking a quiet apology to double-oh-three and beginning to redirect the agent. But Bond did not whir back into motion. Bond stood, and he blinked.

Slowly, moving deliberately, but without stealth, the agent approached the door of Q’s office. The glass was that milky obsidian-black, and it showed him the face of an old man. He blinked away and would not look at it. With considerably less consternation or ill emotion than he truly felt, he reached up a loosely curled hand and knocked on the door. Morse code, two spaced-out taps first, followed then by one quick, a final slow: Q.

It was a time before anything happened. Bond watched his reflection warp and blur as his eyes became dry from not blinking, but he didn't step away. Quiet as a kill, the door sighed softly. The glass did not disengage its unnatural blackness, but Bond knew that the hydraulics would permit him. Quietly, then, he reached up and pulled the door open with a gentle hiss and blinked at the lights of Q’s inner sanctum.

And there, head resting on his desk, was the same Quartermaster. One arm was folded beneath his head - and again Bond thought of a starling or a sparrow , and the other arm laid thinly across the desk. His hair was unruly, and his skin looked waxen-pale in the LED lights of the office with fever-streaks of color painted on the high parts. Papers were stacked all around and bursting from file folders, and some of them had found their way to the floor. Many littered the ground around a waste-paper basket, but few appeared to have made it in. Tea mugs seemed stacked haphazardly, and a congealed mass of instant noodles sat, cold and ignored, on a soggy-looking paper plate.

“Q, I’m sorry.”

It was a genuine statement: the agent was quite sorry, and he made no efforts to cover it in his voice. Q did not reply, but Bond became aware of how ragged the Quartermaster's breathing was. It came uneven, and seemed to go randomly between great gulping breaths and airless gasps. Tears were falling down his face and wetting the desk and his cardigan sleeve. His fingers trembled like so many pale leaves. Suddenly, all of his notes seemed to compile and Bond reached a conclusion: his Quartermaster was having a panic attack.

“Q, can you try to breathe deeply? In four, out eight.” Bond said, knowing the boy of a man wouldn’t really register his words yet, but needing to fill the almost-silence with something other than that breathing, loud and choking, as he strode across to the other side of the desk. He knows the beast that is panic, and knows it intimately, and his heart is wrenching from not knowing how to alleviate it. “Can I touch you?”

Q didn’t make a noise, but he held back the trembling of his outstretched fingers enough to tap once, an affirmative.

The agent slid his hands, gently, gently, under the slender and fever-hot body in that chair. He was so light that Bond thought perhaps everything that made up Q had taken a quick jaunt somewhere, and taken its death-heaviness with it. If that were true, or even if it weren’t, he found himself preoccupied with this featherlight figure in his arms and wondering if it could even be healthy for someone with such height to to weigh so little. It took so little effort for the agent to haul his Quartermaster to the side of the room where an eggshell-white futon sat, looking just as picture-perfect as the day it was unpacked. Bond sighed, knowing this meant Q hadn’t been sleeping - as if he couldn’t tell from the weepy aching look of the boy’s eyes.

He set him down gently, and looked upon his face again. What had been a steady stream of tears had slowed to a salty trickle, but his nose still ran, and his skin still looked more like wax than anything human. Upon being sat down, the Quartermaster’s shoulders curled inwards as he stared at the stuttering movement, unbidden, of his fingers. After a time, he looked up at Bond, mouth open like he was going to say something, but all he could do was choke out another sob, forcing more tears, and cough harshly.

“I can’t feel my hands,” Q got stuck and coughed on the ‘c’ sound for a heartbeat - Bond’s own heart jerked again - and when he got past it, he tried to choke out ‘double-oh-seven.’ With a despair in his eyes, he gave up when that stutter grew worse and his voice pitched higher. “Bond.” The word was said as a plea, and the agent did take it as such.

“It’s okay; I’ve got you, Q,” he began, reaching for Q’s bird bone-thin hand. The boy, usually so lion-fearless and sharp like needles and deadlier with a cup of Earl Grey than Bond on the best of days, jerked in shock at the feeling of another’s skin on his own, but he eventually let the agent take his fingers. While he said nothing more, Bond knew the feeling of panicking and the needle-tingles that infected first one’s feet and hands and then spread to make numb the whole body.

Gently, he warmed those icy fingers and their tremble - “Bad circulation,” he remembered Q saying when he commented on their chill during a tech trade-off - between his own. He gently folded them and unfolded them, and rubbed between the tendons, until the quiver slowed a tiny bit and the twitches became of Q’s own volition, as though testing that his fingers still worked. Bond silently wondered at how he typed through the tremble - he knew that this attack had likely been hours in the making, pooling up from oily anxiety, and he’d equally likely been shaking for longer still.

The double-oh glanced up, and noted that the tears had slowed a bit more, but also that his face looked red-hot and the skin was shiny and taut from crying. The soft skin beneath his eyes, white in the corners from tears, was not only swollen from no sleep, but looked painful from scrubbing away tears, and his nose was chapped.

The Quartermaster locked his deep, weepy green eyes on Bond’s shallowly blue ones, but glanced away, unable to maintain even that contact. He pressed his face into Bond’s shoulder, and his own shoulders shook as he wept quietly into Bond’s grey silk Tom Ford. Gently, as though asking a question, the agent shifted that pale and tear-hot face to his chest. Softly, he began to settle his arm around his Quartermaster. He stopped every second or so, because the boy’s shoulders would draw up in alarm at the feeling of anything touching him and he'd begin to make soft wailing noises, and the arm would hover until they slumped again and he quieted. Every shoulder-slump brought in more tears, and Bond ached for it.

He began to be able to feel the hot wet of Q’s tears through the shoulder of his suit, and thought that, perhaps, enough tears were had.

“Q, you seem very dead-set on this course of action,” he began, already regretting his choice in words, “but you are going to cry yourself dry. May I go find you some water? Or warm tea?”

In response, the fingers that had been trembling lightly like a question at the edge of his sleeve clutched tight the fabric, and he shook his head frantically. The recalcitrant hair atop his head was shiny in the light, and moved wildly with the Quartermaster’s shaking. Bond relented, and pulled him closer. He knew that pressing the issue would cause more hurt than it was worth, and he really wasn’t terribly inclined to get up. In his mind was the dead-feeling of the woman-shaped holes of mother and M and Vesper, and he wondered at what was in Q's mind to bring this on.

 

They sat like that for a time, until Q’s weeping quieted to hiccups, and then to a soft shakiness in his breath. Those slender and pale fingers had unclenched, and then just sat lightly on the sleeve of the arm Bond had across his lap. The tremble there was now one of being drained, not of being filled with fuzzy-hot panic.

“Q, you need to get home.”

In response, Q emitted a throaty noise, unable to get any air through his nose.

“Come on, I’ll take you. You can put your address into my GPS; you won’t even have to talk.”

After a quiet moment of hesitation, Q nodded and spoke as he began to painfully unfold himself from his position under Bond’s arm. “I’m so fucking tired, James.”

The agent started at that: Q had never called him by his first name. He cautiously nodded, not wanting to ask the other’s first name, but wanting to know. Q caught his eye, and must have known what he was thinking, because he quietly shook his head.

“I can’t tell you.”

“I know,” Bond said, “and that’s alright. Now, shall we?”

And so they went.


End file.
